


i grew extra arms (to hold onto your body)

by binoculars



Category: Beetlejuice - All Media Types, Beetlejuice - Perfect/Brown & King
Genre: Body Horror, Demon Physiology, Gen, tw for emetophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:02:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23488033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/binoculars/pseuds/binoculars
Summary: The first night after throwing Charles and Delia out, Lydia falls into a kind of desperate hedonism.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 49





	i grew extra arms (to hold onto your body)

The sharp smell of Sharpie bit into Lydia’s nose as she scrawled cobwebs across the wallpaper. Above her, Beetlejuice sat on the ceiling and drew a sodomized imitation of the Sistine Chapel. As Lydia covered flower after flower with black ink, she could hear yelling and impossibly long inhales while two of his clones had some kind of contest working through every aerosol can in the house.

“Can you feel that?”

“Hey, not the broom again—wait, feel what?”

“Them, doing that.” She pointed down the hallway.

“Yeah, sure. Well—you ever had laughing gas?”

“Yeah.” Flickers of being too lethargic to brush her teeth crossed her mind, and she spiked one of the corners of a web.

“I feel it, but it’s like I’m under. Really cucked me over when one of ‘em managed to bag Cary Grant, but it sure as hell helps to keep my head separate from them.”

Lydia wondered if she performed a similar kind of mitosis and killed one of her halves if it would count as murder or suicide. She said as much out loud.

“You wanna find out?”

Lydia felt a chill. “You can do that?”

“Sure, kid. You want just a clone or split consciousness? That gets real fucky real fast, sure, but when you get trapped in a burned-out iHop for fifty years you’ll want all the company y—“

“Nah, maybe not today,” Lydia said.

Later that night, Lydia turned on the radio and they danced together, if it could be called that. There was no choreography to it, just revelry in hurtling around a space they held all to themselves. His clones were surprisingly receptive to being her backup dancers; they chucked her up so high she could see how remarkably clean the Maitlands’ ceiling beams were, and caught her so firmly she suddenly remembered Charles spinning her, hands holding tight and body briefly airborne while her mother sang to one of their old calypso records.

As the song petered out, Lydia opened her mouth to describe the memory, then recalled the miserable recountings of Beetlejuice’s childhood (if it could be called that) that previous mentions of her mother had provoked. Instead, she said, “You wanna get dinner?”

It turned out he did eat, voraciously, as did the clones. They sat around the contact-paper island in the kitchen, and Lydia laughed until her stomach ached when, one after another, he imitated the Last Supper, said the most obscene grace of her life, and then started eating the plates whole.

In the middle of watching a very evenly-matched arm wrestle match, Lydia glanced down and realized her food held more artificial colors than she’d seen since Delia had wiggled into her life. She wondered aloud if Beetlejuice could see any colors she couldn’t.

“Tell me if any of these look new to you,” he said, and snapped with more flair than Lydia thought was likely necessary.

Then her eyes rolled back, and when she jerked them open, she was seeing herself. She blinked, and watched her eyelids flap over the whites of her eyes. She watched her eyes widen, and her hands grip uselessly at the table, and her mouth ask:

“Am I—“

“Nah, you’re just living with me for a hot minute,” said Beetlejuice, much closer than before. “Wasn’t sure if your sight was mixed up in other senses, so all of it’s in here for now. Whaddya wanna look at?” He stood up, and Lydia’s mind swam.

“What the fuck is your inner ear?” she heard herself ask.

“My what? Whatever, are you seeing anything?”

Lydia could see herself turning green, but she choked it down and forced herself to look elsewhere. The backsplash was shimmering vaguely, and she could see minute flickers in the overhead light. She looked at one of the clones, and it was as if a negative of a photo had been overlaid on its body, but even then—the image vibrated as if it were about to explode, shattering at the edges and wrestling itself—colors that left vertigo afterimages, colors that were a painting she’d seen in a dream, colors that made her intestines crawl—

Beetlejuice scratched at the back of his neck, and Lydia felt the way his old, old bones moved underneath shambles of tissue; he yawned, and the world that was exposed when his tongue touched air was a punch to the gut, she could smell the different layers of paint on the walls, she could—

He breathed once. Lydia’s mind stuttered.

She couldn’t feel her heart beating.

“Beetlejuice, let me out!”

She felt his gut jump with the name, felt his dead skin scrape as he snapped his fingers, felt the lines of the room bend around an immense sink of power—

She felt herself throw up.

Later that night, the group of them lounged around the living room and watched late-late-night television. Loud adverts in the cheapest slots flickered across the room, and the two of them relentlessly mocked everything that passed. As the night progressed and the darkness outside turned into a growing light, Lydia sank deeper into Beetlejuice’s feverishly hot and impressively soft side.

She snapped awake in a cold sweat a couple hours later. She picked her head up, and found herself lying half on top of him. Her front was drenched with sweat at the furnace-like heat emanating from him, and her back was freezing from exposure to the Maitlands’ airy living room. The clones were gone, and the TV was off. His chest was immobile and silent.

Lydia’s stomach turned vaguely, but there were so many possible causes she didn’t bother to identify it. In the middle of her gathering the energy to get up and shower, he let out a snore like a car backing up. His chest started moving slowly to a rhythm belonging to no living creature.

Lydia wondered why, for a moment, before realizing. Without letting herself consider it, she put her stale smell and cold back and the faint, deep nausea in her lungs out of mind for another stolen hour, and let herself be lulled back to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> title from the song "Carry Me" by the Original Crooks and Nannies. another song that really fits this one is "Break My Face" by AJR.  
> i saw the musical version of beetlejuice last week, then i didn't do anything other than listen to that album for a week


End file.
